Kade lay on his bed and contemplated his future. The Shiva he’d gotten to know in those files was an exceptionally patient man. He was also a man of incredible passion, willing to take extraordinary steps to achieve his goals.

Would he be patient with Kade, waiting for a change of heart?

Or would he try to force what he wanted to know out of him?

Kade had to be ready for either. He had to be on the lookout for escape. He had to be mentally prepared to be a prisoner for a very long time. And he had to be ready for torture, or drugs, or any other way that Shiva might try to get the knowledge out of his brain.

And when it came down to it, there was only one foolproof defense against that last possibility. Memory deletion could work in isolated cases, if a memory was fresh and new, if it hadn’t been integrated into a thousand networks across the brain. But that wasn’t the case now. That left only Ilya’s choice. To sleep, but not to dream. To die to keep what he knew out of others’ hands.

Kade felt no fear any more. He felt only clarity. The clarity of understanding where he fit in the world. The clarity of having decided once and for all what he believed in.

He wrote the script he needed, and pinned it to a corner of his mental field of vision. He could activate it with a second’s notice. Then he lay on his back and stared out the windows at the twinkling stars and the cloudless sky. If he had to die, this was as beautiful a place as any.

Shiva watched the stars wheel across the sky. Lane was so naïve. Such an idealist. He’d lived a comfortable life. He’d never seen real poverty, real death. He’d never learned the visceral lesson that good intentions and optimism weren’t enough, that you had to act to make what you wanted a reality, whatever the cost.

But the boy seemed certain of his decision. So be it. They would have to do this the hard way.

Chapter 66: Halting State

66

HALTING STATE

Friday November 2nd

Su-Yong Shu screamed silently as the question came at her again. The equivalence theorem, the equivalence theorem, the equivalence theorem.

Raw pain pounded its way through her simulated brain, pure pain, essential pain, devoid of any remedy, of any physical cause she could address, of any way to relieve its inexorable pressure.

She screamed in her mind, longing for a mouth to cry out with, fists to clench, a head to pound into a wall.

A gun to end her husband’s life.

I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW